Competitive and Leadership Structure Schemas and Team Level Consequences

Team leadership schemas are naive theories or belief sets that individuals hold about how leadership should be enacted within teams. We examine two such schema: leadership structure schema – the degree to which a team should have shared or hierarchical leadership – and leadership competitiveness schema – the degree to which members believe that leadership emergence is a competitive process. In a sample of 161 student project teams, we examined the impact of these two schemas on important team processes and outcomes. Our findings suggest that individual leadership schemas, when aggregated to the team level, shape team leadership structure, conflict, satisfaction and performance.